While spending a bit of time this weekend working on a new color scheme for ChrisHammond.com I came across the need to be able to add a hyperlink to an image (html IMG tag) using jquery. Why would I want to do that? Well, to be honest I didn’t want to go in and modify the “skin” on my DotNetNuke site, but I did want to create a link on the “HeaderGraphic” image in the skin. Originally that image didn’t link anywhere, now, as I am working on fundraising for the The LIVESTRONG Challenge Davis even on June 24, 2012, I wanted to link that graphic to my “Philanthropy” page.

Doing this in jQuery is rather easy to do assuming you have a way to target the element, in this case I can target the .HeaderGraphic class (part of the MultiFunction skin for DotNetNuke).

Here is the sample code for adding a hyperlink to an image using jQuery.

<script>
    $(document).ready(function(){
        $('.HeaderGraphic').wrap( 
                 $('<a>').attr('href', '/philanthropy.aspx')
        );
    });
</script>

In order to safely embed this into a DotNetNuke page I’ve added it into the Header setting in the Module Settings for one of the modules at the bottom. That particular module is configured to Display On All pages using the module settings.

If you found this code to be help, I ask that you please donate to my cause on the Philanthropy page. Donate what you feel is appropriate.

I have thought for a while now that I should do some SiteMap integration for a couple of modules, but I honestly never got around to getting it done.

Something triggered my need yesterday, and I got rolling with things rather quickly. Chris Paterra has a great post on how to implement a sitemap for your modules, I ended up implementing one for the DNNSimpleArticle module which powers the homepage of Solo2.org and SCCAForums.com. I also implemented it for the module that powers ChrisHammond.com, DNNBlogs.com, Project350z.com and DomoticsBlog.com

The basics are pretty straight forward for getting a SiteMap integrated with your custom modules. I won’t recreate Chris’ blog post here, but basically you need to create a new class, and populate a list of SiteMapUrls. Depending on your module, and it’s content, that may or may not be difficult.

I think I’m going to implement the sitemap for the next release of the Wiki module, should be fairly straightforward.

Have you upgraded your website to DotNetNuke 5.6.2 yet? I’ve upgraded a few of mine. ChrisHammond.com being one of those.

More to come next week, doubtful that I’ll get to them this week with the National Tour in San Diego this weekend!

Project350z got enough “likes” on facebook today to get our own URL http://facebook.com/project350z/ head on over and like us there! Most of the likes actually came through facebook ads. I ran an ad campaign, with a $5 max. I’m rather impressed with the results and the number of impressions the ad saw, and even the click throughs from the page to the site!

So tonight after work and before the St. Louis .Net User Group meeting I ran to Borders to see if I could find my book on the shelf. Well guess what, I did!

I was pretty stoked to find it, but was shocked to only see the DNN4 book on the shelf, not any of the other DNN books. Well after digging around for a while I found them on another section, so I took the opportunity to organize a little :D Here’s the result.

So it looks like my travelling is starting back up here pretty quickly. This weekend Natalie and I are headed to Colorado to do another round of house hunting. We’ll be back in town either Sunday or Monday, thankfully Kim is staying at our place again to watch the dogs while we are gone, thanks Kim! For more info on that trip check out http://www.going2colorado.com/

Next weekend I’ll be cruising around Missouri and Illinois on a Harley with Kevin, we did this two years ago and wanted to do it again before the move to CO. The week after that I’m headed to Virginia for a couple of days of DotNetNuke Training. I’ll be back in town the weekend of our niece’s birthday party, and then the following week I head to Tampa Florida for the Day of DotNetNuke. The DayOfDNN is actually on Saturday but I’ll be doing a DotNetNuke Essentials Workshop on Friday, and also a DotNetNuke Best Practices Workshop on Sunday following the event.

In other news I also got word this week that I’ve been accepted as a speaker for the third year in a row for the DotNetNuke OpenForce conference held in Las Vegas in November. I’m honored to have been selected to speak again, there were a lot of submissions this year and a lot of big names in the community included in those submissions. Also a quick congrats to my fellow Engage employee Cuong Dang for having two sessions at OpenForce this year, his second time attending and presenting.

It’s turning out to be a busy summer, hopefully we find a house this weekend so we can get our move on and get settled so we can enjoy all the upcoming things!

So it’s just after 1am on Monday March 9th, 2009. Pat Renner and I have wrapped up and submitted the final chapter of our DotNetNuke book. We are far from complete on the whole book writing process, but we are at least at the big milestone of being done with the majority of the writing of the book.

Now we begin the process of editing our chapters that we are getting back from the editor and technical editor. I got the first chapter back for author review before my trip to Orlando last week but had to set it aside and focus on finishing up the writing process before starting on it. Tonight (Monday) will begin the process of the author review and cleaning up the materials so that they can be sent off to the production department.

The book writing process is interesting, fun, painful, a great education experience. I’ve learned so much about DNN, but more importantly about how to communicate what I know about DNN in an easy to understand manner. At least I hope I have! I guess we will find out when people start reading the book!

I’ll post more about my trip to Orlando later this week, I wish I had stayed another night to watch the Kepler launch, but because the book wasn’t finished I had to get home.

No, this isn’t a hang over blog post. I’m here in Connecticut doing some super secret (not really) work and got to hang out with the cast of Mondays What Sunday Threw Up for dinner tonight.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not much of a podcast guy, I have tried in the past, but I like my music too much to listen to something else throughout the day. That might have to change now. As soon as I get home I’m going to add this to my podcasts on my Zune software to start syncing up the show. These guys are damn funny in person, the clip I heard from a show from a few years ago was even more funny, so I am going to have to give this a whirl. I question, when would I listen though? I’m concerned if I listen while driving down the road I might laugh myself off the road…

Thanks for dinner tonight guys, it was fun and I hope to see you all again!

So December 15th was our first book deadline. Pat and I met early Sunday morning and went through both of our chapters making some reviews. He ended up submitting his chapter on the 15th, mine was submitted late due to some pretty major overhauls we made to the structure of the chapter. I found the first chapter hard to write, I think the next few chapters will be easier. Chapter 1 was the intro/overview of all things, so it was hard to try to wrap all that information up into basic content that our intended reader will be able to understand.

We’re waiting on feedback from our editor for the submitted chapters, hopefully we’ll get some of that before our next deadline of 1/15, otherwise we feel like we’re writing blind. We’ve already started on the next chapters for the deadline, I’m dealing more with actual DNN content in these chapters, so I think they will be much easier to write now.

More updates in the future.

So I’m home this weekend working on the book, our first deadline is on Monday, so Pat and I are both working on finishing up our submissions. To procrastinate a little I decided to do a quick search on Amazon, not expecting to find it, but I did! I found a listing for our book! Here it is!

DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide: Get Your Website Up and Running

Now, I must get back to writing.

So I made some more changes to ChrisHammond.com today. I updated the URL structure of the site to use the URL Master module from http://www.iFinity.com.au. So far it’s working great. The urls should be shorter and cleaner now, hopefully more SEO friendly as well. Take a look around, if you see anything wrong let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

So for the past week I’ve been working on a new skin/layout. It’s not much, but it’s a start of cleaning up my personal site a little. I’m going to be making some tweaks to the formatting of the way the blog posts are displayed over the next couple of weeks. In order to do that though I need to get the 5.3 version of Engage: Publish released so that I can get to work on the templating system for the module that will allow me to do the new formatting that I want.

What do you think of the new look?

I don't know why it has taken me this long, but I've finally taken down all the google ads from my personal website at www.chrishammond.com. I had the page all littered up with ads for the past few years. I just ran a report on my google adsense account and it looks like I started running ads on ChrisHammond.com somewhere around 8/23/2004. Since that time I've had 373k page impressions, 2,565 clicks, with earnings near $466. That averages to about 309 impressions a day, 2 clicks per day, a click through rate of .69% and $1.25 CPM. Not a bad overall number, but for 4 years, making $116 a year on ads I don't think it is worth the clutter on the site anymore.

So for now, ChrisHammond.com is Google Adsense free. That doesn't mean I won't have other ads running on the site, I will most likely setup some sort of banner system between all of my websites (102 total domains on my godaddy account now), to cross promote all the various things I work on throughout the year.

What do you think? Are google adsense ads a waste with the numbers generated above?